Rainey Royal (24 page)

Rescue is a big deal, Leah thinks.

“Before I forget?” she says. “I wanted to tell you, I’m gone all day. At work. My dining table has nothing on it. Ever. If you wanted to use my place as a studio.”

To her amazement this falls into a silence with something hard at the bottom. It reminds Leah of the granite floor at the foot of the grand staircase.

“But she works at home.” Tina takes her hands out of her pockets and laces her fingers around her knees, despite the cold. She keeps them still, where Leah’s
fingers would fidget for a cigarette. Leah thinks:
They’ve talked about me
.

“Yeah, I know. But if she wanted a studio,” says Leah. She tries to keep the edge out of her voice.

“Hello, I’m right here,” says Rainey. “I’m fine.”

Leah tries to look contrite. “Sorry,” she says. “It was a thought.” She remembers the envelope Tina passed to Rainey; she wonders if Tina, a medical student, could have given Rainey money or was repaying it—no matter, it was as if they were sharing a tank of air, passing the regulator back and forth.

“Your mother?” prompts Rainey.

My mother loved your work
.

Leah takes a breath. “I’m sorry,” she says. “She showed prints to her clients. It just didn’t happen.”

Does Rainey look at her as if she can see Helen’s note, read the lines about black roses and white tapestries? It’s not possible. And yet Leah could swear that she does.

She waits for Rainey to say,
Thank you for trying. Thank you for trying, Lee-lee
.

After a moment Leah says, “I really tried,” exactly as Rainey starts to speak. They both stop, talk at the same moment again. Leah laughs. Rainey waits. Leah lurches on.

“My mother showed them to everyone, but it just—she said she’s sorry.”

Rainey nods. She holds out her hand, resting her arm on Tina’s knees. For a split second Leah thinks she is extending
her hand in friendship. Then she understands. She relinquishes the yellow Kodak box.

Leah opens her mouth, but stops. She can’t think of a reason to ask for the slides back. The box vanishes into Rainey’s purse.

O
NE YEAR LATER, ON
the day Rainey buries her father, Leah will want to fix this, to seal things between them. Tina will stand as close to Rainey as a bodyguard. Leah will almost do it anyway, will almost say:
We came so close last time—let’s send my mom new slides
. But Helen might slip. She might give Leah away.
Where were you two years ago
, Helen might say.
I was waiting for your call
. And then Leah might see ice in Rainey’s eyes.

ARRHYTHMIA

Midnight in a house where strangers wander: Rainey’s door should be shut tight. But Tina, from the staircase, sees into Rainey’s pink room—blush walls, pooling fuchsia curtains. On rough nights, this room reminds Tina of the inside of someone’s mouth.

It’s every bit her business. She steps inside.

Lying on the canopy bed is a silver-haired man with long, curled toenails and a pregnancy gut. He is reading a battered paperback. A black French-horn case is parked on the floor. He looks comfortable.

Tina says calmly, “I don’t think you belong here, motherfucker.”

Tina herself has been installed in the hundred-year-old townhouse with Rainey and Howard since her grandmother died.
Gracias a Dios
, she got through medical school rent-free.

Now she’s a resident; she’s ob-gyn. She works eighty-hour weeks. She can nap standing up. She hallucinates flashes of light, which is happening now, after sixteen hours on her feet.

The silvery man dog-ears his book and swings his legs off the bed. “Apologies, sister,” he says. Tina sees he’s not as old as he looks, just stringy. “No need to yell,” he says.

“Am I yelling?” says Tina. “Who did you think was going to show up?”

Not quite meeting her eyes, he shambles toward the door and edges past her. “Apologies,” he says. He limps with his horn up the stairs toward the servants’ quarters. Tina’s own room is on the fifth floor, too. She has come home from the hospital several times to find one ropy musician or another rooting through her bureau drawers.

“Go down,” Tina says, “not up. Go home.”

The man looks over the banister at her. “I’ve played with Dollar Brand,” he says. “Don’t know who
you
are, but Howard Royal invited me. This is
his
house.”

“Not quite,” says Tina.

She has never heard of Dollar Brand. And she knows for sure this is no longer Howard’s house. She feels Howard’s time here is waning. Tina spent half her teenage life in Rainey’s pink room; she knew the worshipful young musicians whom Howard took in. She helped pack their shit up last year when Rainey turned twenty-five, took over as trustee, and threw them out while Howard roared.

Now Howard brings home stray musicians one night at a time, and chicks he meets at the clubs. Tina comes down for breakfast, and some sleepy bimbo will be all
Hey, you know where they keep the coffee?
It cuts her every time, but she keeps her feelings to herself. It seems to her that if you play jazz like Howard, you should live in harmony with its godly source. But Howard’s godly source seems to vanish when he rises from the piano.

Anyway, he refuses to move out. He lives off Rainey’s trust. Rainey can’t evict her own father, can she? Rainey can’t even put Howard’s shadow, Gordy, in the street. Tina regards the listing shadows of the staircase and listens to the ragged footsteps.
Howard, where would you go?

“You’re trespassing,” Tina calls, but already she hears the horn player padding toward his room.

W
HEN
R
AINEY GETS HOME
from Flynn’s she sits on Tina’s bed, because her own is polluted:
long toenails
. Now Tina will have to strip Rainey’s bed before she sleeps, and probably make it, too. She makes a flawless bed. She can iron the ruffles on a Sunday blouse and cook
rellenos de papas
and mango flan. Her grandmother taught her the domestic arts from her wheelchair.

Rainey says, “You think it’ll kill him?”

“It might,” says Tina. She closes her eyes and slips into a micro-nod over her unopened beer.

“You’re not helping,” says Rainey. “I’m not locking him
out forever. I’ll let him back in when he calms down. So he can find his own place.”

Tina opens her beer and gives Rainey a long, waiting look. Next to her bed is a tiny window to which darkness cleaves. Tina leans over and pulls the string on the roller shade for privacy, and the room becomes a box.

“He won’t stay,” says Rainey. “Without his own key, he won’t stay.”

Tina swallows deeply, looking at Rainey over the bottle and saying nothing.

“You think he’ll hate me?” Rainey takes the bottle and drinks.

“Howard loves you to death.” Tina hesitates. “Does he have enough to move out?”

“He can give lessons,” says Rainey. “He can work like a normal person.”

“Howard’s not a normal person.” Tina tugs the bottle from Rainey’s hand. “He can’t afford the kind of place they let you put a Steinway.”

“Jesus, whose side are you on?”

“Yours,” says Tina promptly. She watches Rainey: cross-legged at the foot of the bed, carefully separating out a long, thick strand of hair like she intends to make something with it. They haven’t braided each other’s hair in years. Tina shivers. It’s chilly up here in winter. She has one of the dreary little rooms where servants once slept on creaky narrow bedsteads and suffered cracked windows in winter. Her clothes
are in a nineteenth-century maple wardrobe, and her medical school textbooks are lined up on a battered desk she dragged in from another room.

Howard has the entire second floor. Sneaking down to see him is not easy. She has to get past Gordy and Rainey, who share the third floor. Tina has been sneaking in to see Howard, one way or another, since she was sixteen.

Now she is twenty-six, and Howard walks with a twinge in his hip, and sometimes when they meet in the shabby rooms of other musicians they lie on the bed fully dressed, and he holds her while she dozes.

“Maybe you should talk to him one more time,” says Tina.

To live like this, Tina has closed a door in her head so heavy no light can leak through. She finds she likes living in airtight, watertight compartments.

“I’ve tried talking. I’ll be supporting him and Gordy till they’re ninety.”

Tina considers this. She herself grew up taking care of her grandmother, while downstairs her mother lived with Tina’s sisters, and across the city, her father lived with a woman who worked in a courthouse cafeteria. Someone had to bathe the grandmother, dress her each day in dignified black. But Tina’s
abuela
kept her studying at the Formica kitchen table; she kept her sane. She exalted her to
be a doctor
when Tina was busy failing ninth grade. And what were her sisters doing now? They were married, making babies, laboring at stoves with saffron-scented steam.

“My future husband will love it,” says Rainey. “He’ll really want to stick around.”

Tina nods slowly. She has no future husband; she works too hard. Occasionally she’s afflicted by a tattoo artist, though he sees other women, and last month, when he took her to City Island, she fell asleep over fried clams. Tina will not let him tattoo so much as a bumblebee on her foot. She is a
doctor
. It isn’t funny.

Howard is not husband material, though he teaches her about life. And it is true that Howard drives Rainey’s boyfriends away with sarcasm and sexual innuendo, and it is true that Rainey has someone wonderful. She has Flynn, who years ago quit Juilliard for Howard Royal.

Then he quit Howard for medical school. Flynn is an oncologist now, a man who battles cells that simultaneously multiply and divide. Flynn is as delicate and lean as an egret, and his focus is quick and sharp like a bird’s, too.

Tina keeps the faith with Rainey in this one department: she ignores Flynn. She remembers how Flynn and Rainey used to stare at each other across the parlor, silent over Howard’s jazz. Meanwhile Howard would pin Tina with his gaze from the piano, and Tina’s abdominopelvic region would caramelize. It wasn’t just the way he made her feel
seen
; it was his hands on the keyboard—those strong, spread, prancing fingers.

“Oh, God. I’m scared.” Rainey takes the bottle from Tina and drains the beer. “ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,’ ” she says. “He always mocks me in Shakespeare.”

Tina pulls her folded nightgown out from under her pillow. She needs sleep, but she won’t undress in front of Rainey.
When you change
, her grandmother instructed,
don’t look down
, and she meant when Tina was alone.

“I’m not trying to save you from hurting Howard,” says Tina. She speaks slowly, feeling out which of her words are true and which just sound good. “I’m trying to save you from hurting yourself.”

T
INA HOLDS
R
AINEY
’
S HAIR
so she can throw up. She pours Rainey a shot of Jack Daniel’s for strength. But she won’t dredge up the yellow pages so Rainey can call an all-night locksmith. That Rainey has to do herself.

Howard Royal and Gordy Vine are out, playing an uptown club.

Tina falls onto her bed fully dressed. Screw the nightgown. She leaves Rainey waiting for the locksmith on the stoop, pretending to be a locked-out person and wearing Tina’s down coat and fleece-lined boots. Rainey’s own clothes are never warm enough. God, she can be such a waif.

Tina wakes when Rainey comes into her room. She hears her lay a brass key on the nightstand and feels her climbing into the twin bed. They have never shared a bed. Don’t snuggle, Tina prays. Rainey doesn’t snuggle.

“He let me keep the old lock,” she whispers. “Guess what it’s called.”

Tina makes a
don’t wake me
noise.

“A cylinder,” says Rainey. “Like on a gun.”

Tina feels she is falling. She lets herself fall. It’s glorious. An insistent ringing wakes her.

Not morning. Please God not morning. She lunges over Rainey for the clock. It’s only 4:45. She can sleep till 5:30. Ringing won’t stop.
Doorbell
.